$60 a Month: Introduction
Back before she was a media empire unto her own, I used to watch this weird little show on Food Network called “$40 a Day” in which an insanely perky woman named Rachael Ray visited various towns and tried to dine out for a whole day with just forty bucks. Eventually Ms. Ray became a household name with something obscene like sixteen different shows on the air, books, magazines and so forth and really wore out her welcome on my TV at least.
But this is not about Rachael Ray.
Granted, the premise of $40 a Day was kind of arbitrary: Obviously she was filming a TV show and we can safely assume she didn’t pay for her airfare around the country out of her own pocket so why she was limited to a couple of twenties was never adequately explained. But the idea of working within strict parameters and trying to make the most of limited resources appeals to me.
Enter gaming. I play a lot of games. When you boil it right down, every single one of my hobbies and pastimes is in some way or another related to playing games. But the one universal truth about games of all varieties is that they are expensive. When you consider my interest in video games, board games, role-playing games, tabletop wargames, collectible card games and even social games like darts and pool, it’s easy to see how quickly my paychecks can vanish when left unbridled.
So beginning next month (August 2007), I’m starting an experiment in the spirit of Rachael Ray’s show about dining out: I’ll call it $60 a Month, and I invite you to join me on my little quest.
A Little Background
Obviously the main reason for doing something like this is to avoid blowing my entire income on games and gaming-related items. This is basic hobby management. But there is a slightly more pointed reason for undertaking this endeavor and it has to do with my willingness to see how creative I can get with a set amount of resources. I’m a working adult with a monthly rent, a family to support and plenty of responsibilities. Creating a sticking to a budget is just good common sense. Whenever making a budget I often come across line items that I can look at and say, “Well, I can’t afford to put enough toward this optional expense, so I’ll just live without it.” It might be easy to cut back my gaming budget and just say, “Ah, I can’t afford all the stuff I want so I’ll just do without.”
But that’s annoying. I play games because I love them and I want to keep playing them as much as possible. It’s bad enough when you can’t find time or like-minded friends to play with, but cutting back on gaming to make way for rising gas prices or vacations? There has to be some sort of middle ground. So my goal is not just to have a budget for games and stick to it, but to use that budget to try and play as many games as I possibly can.
The Rules
While inspired by the food-based TV show, this experiment will use some guidelines that are unique to it and need to be established up front. I’ll try to keep them as simple and concise as possible.
- I have exactly $60 every calendar month to spend as I choose on gaming. Note that this includes all fees for materials or services used to enable the playing of games. So it does cover video game software, rentals, role-playing books, tournament entry fees, hardware, recurring service fees that enable gaming (eg XBox Live or World of Warcraft subscriptions), game peripherals (like dice, battery packs, miniatures, modelling supplies, extra controllers, etc) and boxed sets. It does not include things only tangentally related to games like novels or comic books based on licensed gaming properties, non-device-specific batteries, internet access fees, event registration fees or home improvements (even if their function is to better a gaming experience, like an HDTV or furnishing a game room). I’m not going to count gaming magazines against the fund because they don’t involve actually playing the games.
- Funds from one month can be saved and spent during a later month. Of course, the spirit of the experiment is to try to maximize the alloted monies and not horde it up, but certain gaming purchases require an investment of greater than a single month’s budget and must be planned for accordingly.
- Success in the experiment will be measured by the Games Acquired/Games Played tally posted in each $60 a Month entry.
- Used games, free games and swapped titles or materials all count toward the Games Acquired tally. The Games Played tally consists of a ratio: Number of new games played during the month compared to the number of total games played.
- Gift games do not count toward the Games Acquired tally but can count toward the Games Played. Gift cards, as well as credit earned from trade-ins can be used to increase the Games Acquired total so long as their combined value does not exceed $100 in a single month. Note that excess values can be carried over to later months but cannot be pro-rated. (As an example, say I receive a $200 gift card to EB Games for my birthday in January; I can either spend up to $100 of it in January and then another $100 in February or I can claim it in January without spending any and then spend it all in February to buy a larger item. I cannot spend $200 in January and claim that I’m using February’s allotment early.)
- Small increases in the allowance may be earned via occasional cash-generation means. Games or game materials (anything that would count against the $60 budget) can be sold and the cash repurposed toward buying new games, although this counts against the $100 trade-in/gift card limit. Also, up to $200 per quarter can be added to any budget provided the money comes from turning in recyclable materials. This $200 recyclables allowance is a use-it-or-lose it kind of deal; it cannot be saved up or carried over from one quarter to the next.
- Not all games acquired must remain in my possession at the end of the month, but in order to be counted as an acquisition for that month I must have played it before getting rid of it.
The rules may need to be refined going forward as certain situations arise, but they are designed to allow a certain degree of creative flexibility while still adhering to the spirit of the experiment which is to try and see how well I can manage limited resources while trying to make the most of them.
Evaluating My Existing Assets and Expenses
Currently I own the following gaming-related items:
- An XBox 360 console with roughly 11 games, plus two original XBox games.
- A Nintendo DS with about 11 games, plus one Game Boy Advance game.
- A PlayStation 2.
- A Mac mini and one installed game (WarCraft III).
- Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 published board and card games.
- A couple dozen core role-playing books plus another 30 or so supplemental materials including Shadowrun, GURPS and Dungeons & Dragons.
- A fairly large Chaos Space Marines Warhammer 40K army, mostly painted, and all requisite game materials.
- A handful of assorted other Warhammer 40K models, in various states of assembly.
- Two Blood Bowl teams (Undead and Orks), mostly painted.
- A Necromunda gang, unpainted.
- A Gorkamorka boxed set, nearly mint, unpunched/unassembled/unpainted.
- A Battlefleet Gothic boxed set, nearly mint, punched but unassembled/unpainted.
- An assortment of historical Napoleonic miniatures, unpainted.
- A large but not match-regulation Warmaster army (Imperial), partially painted.
- Several decks of Magic: The Gathering cards including a couple of constructed decks and one or two P-Type decks.
- An electronic dart board, not mounted.
- A Java-enabled cell phone with no non-trial version games installed.
- An iBook G4 with no games installed.
In order to approach the project with a realistic expectation of how it’s going to work, I need to also figure out what I’m already spending on games.
Currently I subscribe to GameZnFlix.com, which is a GameFly competitor. It might be easy to excise the subscription fee from the budget because I can also put movies in my queue and therefore there could be months where I don’t use the subscription for any games at all. But I also have a Netflix account that I’ve had forever so for now GnF is only serving me games. As long as I retain both accounts and am not using GnF for movies, I need to count the fee against my budget.
I also have an XBox Live subscription that costs me $50 per year. Now that’s a one-time fee but as long as I save up for it it works out to just over $4 per month. Since my subscription began in January and I haven’t been actively saving for it up to this point, I’ll have to come up with the money sometime in the next four months or I’ll have to use nearly all my budget in January on renewing the subscription.
Lastly, I use Goozex for game trading. Goozex doesn’t have a subscription fee but they do charge $1 for each trade and you have to cover the shipping fees when you send a game to another Goozex user. Also, the system works on a points basis that you earn by trading your existing games to other members but it is possible to purchase points directly. I will have to include any of these fees in my calculations since they actively facilitate game acquisition.
So my GameZnFlix.com subscription fee is $12.75 per month for three games at a time. My XBox Live subscription costs $50 and if I spread it evenly over the next five months that means $10 from every budget. Assuming I continue with these services and this breakdown, I’m already looking at only a $37.25 monthly budget. Man, it goes fast!
Month One: The Plan
So starting on August 1st I have to adhere to my new budget. Considering that August is the second month in Q3, that means I only have two months to boost my August/September budgets via recycling. Fortunately, I have a lot of crushed aluminum cans I haven’t turned in for some time so hopefully that will help get me started. I don’t know how much I’ll get from them and I don’t know how much I’ll have to turn in for Q4 once I tap my reserves. I estimate I have maybe $75 worth in cans right now but I may only collect $20 worth between the time I trade those in and the Q4 deadline.
What I really need to do is break down some sort of plan by determining what games that are slated to be released in the next few months I really want to buy straight away and which I can hold off on playing until they become available for rental or at a lower price. Also I need to consider what events are coming up that I may want to enter and start planning now for any big, expensive purchases like new hardware because they’re going to require a lot of saving.
So here are the games that I want to own as soon as they come out or at the very least as soon as I can afford them (all release dates and prices come from GameStop):
- Halo 3 (9/25) – $59.99
- Beautiful Katamari (10/30) – $39.99
- Mass Effect (11/1) – $59.99
- Rock Band (11/20) – $199.99
Obviously this is going to be a problem since there is no way my budget will readily allow for Rock Band without some kind of help. But this is where the creativity kicks in. Now the next thing I need to do is figure out if I have any special goals I want to accomplish:
- While not a requirement, I’d like to try to mix things up some so I’m not spending all my money each month on just video games or just Magic or just Warhammer. Variety is the spice of life, right? To start with I’ll devote $10 to tabletop gaming and the rest to video games, but mostly that’s because of the sheer volume of highly anticipated stuff coming out in the next few months in electronic gaming. I’ll adjust that a bit later.
- Eventually I’d like to pick up a PS3 and possibly a PSP as well. The PS3 is probably going to be out of my price range for some time and until I have an HDTV is really not even all that attractive to me. So my first hardware savings exercise is going to be for the PSP. The new bundles coming out with the redesigned hardware are $199.99 before tax which, in my state, works out to $216.50. I’m already working off of a reduced budget because of my rental subscriptions and XBox Live renewal so for the first few months I’ll set the savings rate at $7.25 and call it “expendible.” If I end up saving all the money I’ll have $36.25 toward a PSP by the end of the year. Not great, but every little bit counts.
So where does that leave me?
Tentative Budget Breakdown
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| GameZnFlix | $12.75 |
| XBox Live Renewal | $10.00 |
| Tabletop Games | $10.00 |
| PSP Savings Fund | $7.25 |
| Video Games | $20.00 |
| TOTAL | $60.00 |
It’s going to take some careful planning, some serious bargain shopping and some tough decision-making to pull this off. Catch me back here next month for the first update installment and we’ll see how I did.